Guild Wars 2

Looking at GW2 Spidy, the prices on the following items:

Vial of Powerful Blood ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24295 )
Armored Scale ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24289 )
Elaborate Totems ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24300 )

And to a lesser extent:
Vicious Claw ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24351 )
Vicious Fang ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24357 )
Powerful Venom Sac ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24283 )

… Are spiking extremely and madly. Is this market manipulation or are there other reasons for this? In a game where gold is scarce for the majority of the population, prices like these are, to put it frankly, ridiculously high.

Read the ecto thread. Basically the Anet employee in charge monitoring the in-game economy said they wanted to increase the demand for some of the less useful items. So people decided T6 mats fell into this category and now we’re riding a bubble.

Nephele.5063:

Read the ecto thread. Basically the Anet employee in charge monitoring the in-game economy said they wanted to increase the demand for some of the less useful items. So people decided T6 mats fell into this category and now we’re riding a bubble.

If there were small increases, I would say this was reasonable. However some of them are doubling in prices. This wouldn’t happen just because Mr Smith said they want to make use of the lower demand items.

The price of T5 Mats also doubled. If I had to guess, the T5 mat increase is in proportion to the ecto increase. Since you need T5 mats to make lvl 80 yellows to salvage into Ecto’s. The T6 mat prices are going up because you need T5 mat’s to transmute into T6 mats. HOWEVER, this still doesnt explain the drastic increase.

Someone, or some people are playing god with the economy. Just look at Crystalline dust prices too. Spiked to over 7s, still sitting at 3.5s. Powerful blood spiked from 5s to over 13s a piece. Totems from 6s to 20s. Scales from 6s to 18s. All in the last day/hours.

This is NOT normal economic fluctuation.

This is getting out of control, i think someone is trying to manipulate the TP again, becouse of the Anet’s post, as you mentioned this is not normal economic fluctuation

Its not only T6 mats, some dyes are Skyrocketing too, Burgundy Dye as example, ive bought 2 of them for 5 silver each yesterday and now i have sold em for over 80.

Same with some other Dyes, not bad if you want to earn gold but for sure not nice for people who still need the dyes.

It will continue to go on until we see whats in the large patch 15th november. After that the prices could fall down towards the prices we have had before the bubble started. However, all depends on whats in the content of the upcoming patch.

Hoood.4935:

This is getting out of control, i think someone is trying to manipulate the TP again, becouse of the Anet’s post, as you mentioned this is not normal economic fluctuation

1 person has a small effect on the TP since most T6 mats are farmed like crazy. Alot of people are buying in on T6 mats I know I have so when the time comes I’’ll make a pretty good profit I can cash in now for good returns.

More people are starting to understand how the economy work in GW2 not everyone buying them up is also trying to resell like myself. I told friend that need them for whatever they are crafting to buy some while they are low now so they won’t have to pay more later.

How do you know you will make good profit? Do i missed something?

oZii.2864:

1 person has a small effect on the TP since most T6 mats are farmed like crazy. Alot of people are buying in on T6 mats I know I have so when the time comes I’’ll make a pretty good profit I can cash in now for good returns.

Do you honestly belive they will keep rising? Right now the prices on T6 mats are ludicrous.

oZii.2864:

More people are starting to understand how the economy work in GW2 not everyone buying them up is also trying to resell like myself. I told friend that need them for whatever they are crafting to buy some while they are low now so they won’t have to pay more later.

This is not normal fluctuations. These are, I repeat, not normal economic fluctuations in a healthy economy.

Also lol @ Burgundy dye.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/20496

This is not people reacting to a statement made by Anet, which I’m sure the majority of the playerbase isn’t aware of. This is market manipulation by a few people likely enriched by early exploits, from which the rest of us now suffer.

It’s likely there’s multiple factors involved in this, but there is hardly enough evidence to support the cry of “market manipulation”, especially given that there are other explanations.

It’s also silly to say that “the rest of us” suffer – people farming and selling those materials are now earning much more than they were before.

I suspect that one of the most significant reasons (but likely not the only reason) is that during the Halloween period more people were playing, and spending disproportionately more time killing mobs as compared to crafting, than they were pre- and post-Halloween – this would have temporarily forced the prices for those materials down.

Nimraphel.7819:

oZii.2864:

1 person has a small effect on the TP since most T6 mats are farmed like crazy. Alot of people are buying in on T6 mats I know I have so when the time comes I’’ll make a pretty good profit I can cash in now for good returns.

Do you honestly belive they will keep rising? Right now the prices on T6 mats are ludicrous.

oZii.2864:

More people are starting to understand how the economy work in GW2 not everyone buying them up is also trying to resell like myself. I told friend that need them for whatever they are crafting to buy some while they are low now so they won’t have to pay more later.

This is not normal fluctuations. These are, I repeat, not normal economic fluctuations in a healthy economy.

I dont know if they will keep rising but I can always check. If they start to drop then I will sell then its not hard. Why isnt it normal? Halloween saw a spike when people speculated on what would be need to craft halloween recipes. Same thing is happening here.

People probably assume bots will be gone or there will be a big ban wave on bots so that means less supply same demand. So prices will go up. Its only been 1 day the sky isn’t falling.

Black liion chest spiked before halloween and dropped. Makes sense to me. Its about a week out from the event on the 15th of november Black lion chest peaked 1 week before halloween.

Like the poster said above people might be spending more since halloween is over. Nobody comes to the forums and makes OMG T6 mats are dirt cheap topic. Which is what happened at halloween prices across the board dropped for anything that wasn’t halloween related or wasn’t the result of some speculation.

Hoood.4935:

How do you know you will make good profit? Do i missed something?

because I bought 100 armored scales at 6s and last i looked they where 8.7s o.O

People complained and complained about bots ruining the game. Well where do you think all those cheap mats came from? Bots who farmed them 24/7.

Well the bots are gone in a couple massive waves of banning, so the supply got destroyed so the prices are now skyrocketing. The mats are going back to their “true” price like they were in the first few weeks of the game before bots became a major problem.

If you treat people like flocks of birds or schools of fish you’ll begin to understand crowd dynamics a bit better. This, in turn, will provide explanation for a lot of these price movements.

If I were to guess as to what is happening it would go like this: Someone makes an off-handed comment about wanting to increase the use of a class of resources.

Someone notices this comment and quickly buys up a bunch of stuff.
Someone else notices this comment and does the same thing.
Yet another person notices and does the -same- thing.

People who were unaware of the comment see the price rising and start buying for no other reason than they see the price rising.

This causes the price to rise faster which, in turn, causes even more people to start buying the item because they want in on this ‘sure thing.’

At this point, people who use the materials realize that the price is going up fast and they better buy in before the price gets too high. So, they pile in on the buying spree which sends the price going up even faster.

Eventually, the market will correct itself assuming that the original pricing was where the equilibrium point was. But, given how many people continue to purchase at these higher prices, it may be that the items will settle in at a new price that is higher than the original price.

But, all of that is to say: This isn’t manipulation of the market as such. This is how markets work – even the stock market. People buy and sell on emotion. The majority of people buy when prices are high and sell when prices are low.

It’s easier to believe there’s some mystical person out there with tens of thousands of gold just picking markets to mess with and “ruining” the economy with a few button presses. Something like that doesn’t require rationality or critical thinking.

ILLUMINATI

Nimraphel.7819:

Looking at GW2 Spidy, the prices on the following items:

Vial of Powerful Blood ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24295 )
Armored Scale ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24289 )
Elaborate Totems ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24300 )

And to a lesser extent:
Vicious Claw ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24351 )
Vicious Fang ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24357 )
Powerful Venom Sac ( http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24283 )

… Are spiking extremely and madly. Is this market manipulation or are there other reasons for this? In a game where gold is scarce for the majority of the population, prices like these are, to put it frankly, ridiculously high.

it have nothing to do with market manipulation

there was some bots banned so theres less bots farming them
price go up

before mass bots appeard price was around 20s for powerful blood

Plain and simple supply and demand.

While banning bots makes everyone happy that they don’t have to deal with them, they will now have to pay higher prices.

Walnuts.

We will see.

I know the die prices dropped pretty quickly due to the higher than normal drop rate, than the eventual return to “normal”.

Market manipulation doesn’t exist!

John Smith.4610:

This is not caused by market manipulation.

It’d be alot more enlightening if you then gave an indication of what we’re seeing; the Burgundy dye rise and to a lesser extent the T6 materials is extreme, particularly the former. Did demand suddenly rise with several hundred percentages overnight with no new apparent avenues for furthering demand? It’s not like some new items were added requiring T6 mats, Ectoplasms and Burgundy dye.

Or is it purely a bot-sweep and/or due to some obscure post that people are interpreting to include abovestated items?

Tier 5 Mats as well. I was buying most of them after the DR Change for 20c a piece and having a blast crafting stuff and gambling with the forge. . Now they ALL are 70c-1s again.

What the hell happened since Halloween ended???

When a whole class of assets changes in price it’s safe to assume there’s an underlying reason for the change, and that it isn’t targeted manipulation; you want to target a single asset with a reasonably low throughput to manipulate.

A wide variety of assets that were previously being kicked out in large numbers by bots have shot up in price. The assumption I would make, given that information, is that a bunch of bots have been banned, choking off the bot supply, and causing the prices of those items to rise as a result.

Ensign.2189:

When a whole class of assets changes in price it’s safe to assume there’s an underlying reason for the change, and that it isn’t targeted manipulation; you want to target a single asset with a reasonably low throughput to manipulate.

A wide variety of assets that were previously being kicked out in large numbers by bots have shot up in price. The assumption I would make, given that information, is that a bunch of bots have been banned, choking off the bot supply, and causing the prices of those items to rise as a result.

That was my first inclination as well, but this change happened almost overnight and affected other markets as well, such as Burgundy Dye (still nobody able to explain that one either). The price would have gone up gradually as the market would have dwindled gradually. Not as it is right now.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24299

Sell listing volume has dropped dramatically (cancel the other options until you’re only looking at sell volume). Maybe a bunch of players are colluding to not sell their mats, or maybe a bunch of bots got banned and can’t sell their mats.

I’m betting on the latter. Especially since buy order volume doesn’t seem to have changed significantly.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/20496

Burgundy Dye looks like someone tried to spike it (bought up a bunch of sell orders all at once, which prompted people to start trying to buy/sell some to flip). It also looks like it didn’t work. Sell price spiked, buy price spiked (at a lower rate), and then the market corrected itself really fast. Right now it’s around 6s, up from around 4s, and I wouldn’t be surprise if it either stabilized there or went back down to 4s.

A spike is when the price goes up and then down. It looks like a spike on the sale price graph. When the price of an object goes up (slowly) and keeps going up, it’s just a price increase (or inflation on the object, I suppose). It looks like a gradual incline.

Spikes tend towards market manipulation or speculation.

Price increases tend towards overall economy changes (changes in drop rates, changes in average level of the players, changes in number of farmers (read: number of unbanned bots)).

They lost their game to bots so are nerfing droprates on most overfarmed materials, lol.

Joshmans.8937:

They lost their game to bots so are nerfing droprates on most overfarmed materials, lol.

read again lots of bots gone = less supply = higher prices

becouse theres not enough bots to crush the market with low price stuff

Lol even ancient Bones starting to skyrocket from 0,2 silver yesterday to 0,9 silver today

John Smith.4610:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Recent-Market-Shifts

Thanks for the update, would love to hear more details about it (how many banned etc).

Anyway, fewer bots = more fun! Hated the bots with a vengeance.

Furthermore, notice that the prices are not only spiking, the number of sell orders also seems to be dropping quite dramatically. This seems to corroborate John Smith’s account that bots are no longer flooding the market.

Anyway, if there would be a supply problem from now on I guess ANet can always find ways to fix it (increase drop rate, create more mobs that drop them, etc). In any case it is better than having the bots around creating unfair competition for players.

It seems to be true that prices are skyrocketing due to fine mats not beeing available that much anymore, you can check this yourself on gw2spidy.com. I’ve just checked ancient bone for example, while a week before 80.000 sell listings it has now about 20.000 and still falling, its the same with all the other fine mats for sure. EDIT: ECTOS Sell Listings 21.000 on 1. November, today 5700

Heh, in a way I liked the Bots in this sense than since Players do nothing but try to overprice and manipulate the market making its frustrating to actually get things.

It hurts when T6 mats are never dropping from lv 84 mobs in Orr, it’s just like slap in face. Now pre-botting drop rate needs to be restored, so crafters can farm again. I’m having serious problems with making exotic jewelry, not enough crystalline dust to make orichalcum from mithril, almost impossible to drop it anywhere

It is still market manipulation no matter what way you slice it
It is just manipulation from Anet
If they got rid of bots and deleted their listings, then they manipulated the market to force prices up

T6 mats as an example price increased about 5x
At one point you could find thing for like 17 or 18c 2 days ago they were in the 50c this morning I saw some over 80c
Funny as a game goes along prices on things usually go down
I’m happy about the battle against bots but a 5x inflation as a side effect isn’t all that great

mangarrage.1062:

It is still market manipulation no matter what way you slice it
It is just manipulation from Anet
If they got rid of bots and deleted their listings, then they manipulated the market to force prices up

Could you define how you use the term manipulation in this sense?

Somehow I have the impression that you use it in a manner that is different than my use of it and it is confusing me.

Thanks.

whiran.1473:

mangarrage.1062:

It is still market manipulation no matter what way you slice it
It is just manipulation from Anet
If they got rid of bots and deleted their listings, then they manipulated the market to force prices up

Could you define how you use the term manipulation in this sense?

Somehow I have the impression that you use it in a manner that is different than my use of it and it is confusing me.

Thanks.

John Smith’s quote, paraphrasing, that “prices are going up to their natural/supposed level again” is market-manipulative. It’s an authority making a normative statement, imposing a will upon/nudging the market. Right there we have an external factor telling us/defining what is apparently natural and normal and what isn’t.

Joshmans.8937:

They lost their game to bots so are nerfing droprates on most overfarmed materials, lol.

I wouldn’t say that they lost the game to bots, but it seems like they can not get this problem under control.

It’s already more then a month that I hear ’we’re working on it’ or ‘the comming weeks’. All the while, the same bots that were reported 5 days ago are still in Orr, happily botting away.

But at least we can buy less stuff now

GUYS.

GUYS.

SHIMMERING DUST WENT ABOVE 24c.

SOUND THE ALARMS.

Edit: On that note, thank god for this Vicious Claw spike, hot kitten.

Nimraphel.7819:

whiran.1473:

mangarrage.1062:

It is still market manipulation no matter what way you slice it
It is just manipulation from Anet
If they got rid of bots and deleted their listings, then they manipulated the market to force prices up

Could you define how you use the term manipulation in this sense?

Somehow I have the impression that you use it in a manner that is different than my use of it and it is confusing me.

Thanks.

John Smith’s quote, paraphrasing, that “prices are going up to their natural/supposed level again” is market-manipulative. It’s an authority making a normative statement, imposing a will upon/nudging the market. Right there we have an external factor telling us/defining what is apparently natural and normal and what isn’t.

Not really manipulation. At least not in the intentional sense. Its a supply and demand thing. The supply dropped while the demand has remained, so yeah, it was a natural progression of the price.

I know I recently bought a lot of these t6 mats I am now getting to the point on my legendary crafting where I need the gift of might and the gift of magic. I bought shortly before the increase and was surprised as how cheap they were so I bought extra in prep for future legendary weapons. I can’t help but wonder if this is just the point where many people are doing this.

Tallis.5607:

Joshmans.8937:

They lost their game to bots so are nerfing droprates on most overfarmed materials, lol.

I wouldn’t say that they lost the game to bots, but it seems like they can not get this problem under control.

It’s already more then a month that I hear ’we’re working on it’ or ‘the comming weeks’. All the while, the same bots that were reported 5 days ago are still in Orr, happily botting away.

The game is 2 months old for christ’s sake, the teams are working their kittens off on balancing, botting, and a million other things. Give them a little credit for what they actually ARE doing.

I’d much rather the prices of items go up because the supply is going down due to botters being banned; then to have a million botters running around and everything being dirt cheap.